A minor thing on any other day. The storm, almost sensing the handicap, rushes in, boxing its fists around the crippled ship. It spins and rolls on the growing waves. The boy can hear the dead-eyed, slippery tuna shifting and sloshing in the hold as he struggles with his lifejacket. The father lets go of his handhold to help the boy. The ship is now just debris carried at the whim of the frothing water. A mountainous wave crashes down, nearly rolling the ship, and the father tumbles overboard, twisted in a heavy fishing net. The boy cries out as the father grabs the wood railing with his one free arm, the other bound in the net. The boy skids and stumbles across the lurching deck, slamming hard against the railing. He bounces up, grabs his father’s arm, and pulls with all his strength, green rubber boots squeaking for purchase. He leans back, pitting his slender body against the entire amused weight of the ocean. He can’t even see his father’s face. His grip is slipping. His boots are inching forward. A metal cleat is just inches away. If he can get his father’s hand around that, then maybe attach the hook from the electric winch to the twisted net, he could . . .
The water surges and heaves, a bull tossing its rider, and his father is gone without a sound, slipping away.
The boy screams, crunches again against the railing, and yells for his father. The thick nets are an anchor, though, and there is nothing to see but a faded cap swirling in a small whirlpool. The ocean spray slaps at the boy’s face—he can taste the salt—and the rain washes it away. He keeps yelling, but the storm drowns him out. When the sea finally quiets down, the boy is too hoarse to make a sound. He tries to fix the fuel line, but salt water has soaked the engine. Constance drifts and bakes in the hot sun in the emptied sky. The dead fish in the hold stink. The entire ship is a floating coffin, with one small boy stubbornly still alive. He sips from a bottle of water and devours the few biscuits that weren’t liquidated. He does not touch the fish.
Eventually, he is found, if not saved.
Nick felt all this in an instant.
That was an accident, Nick sent back. And what I’m doing now is a choice. My choice. You are not responsible for what happened then, or what’s happening now. I am choosing this path. This is not your guilt to carry.
For a moment, Ben resisted the offer. But it wasn’t really an offer. It was a command, a revelation, and it would not be denied. His emotional defenses, a fortress of ice, dissolved beneath the blazing heat and light of Nick’s words. Ben felt brief panic at releasing so much, surrendering so much of what he had become. If he was no longer bound by this grief, this guilt, what was he?
Then relief.
He was free.
Free to do what needed to be done, and to save all those he still could. Maybe not everyone. But he would save all he could, mourn the ones he could not, and keep moving. Those who died protecting and serving the ones they loved would no longer be his burden. They would be his inspiration.
Nick felt these revelations wash over Ben as completely as if they had been his own. Ben deserved this peace. But Nick didn’t have any time left to sit around discussing. Not if he wanted to make his own choice count.
Nick swirled the remaining drones around him like a cloak. They crisscrossed around him, firing as they moved, trying to distract and confuse the mrill fighters. The swarm rushed the mrill ship. Drones were picked off, the fifty or so ships diminishing quickly. Nick closed fast on the mothership, programming his craft to initiate the self-immolation moments before it struck the hull. Once the four-second countdown was started, there would be no turning back, no maneuvering. It was a one-shot opportunity.
Nick thought back on his childhood, peaceful and happy. No major traumas, only the standard pains and regrets. His final year of high school, when he’d mentioned that he was thinking of joining the Navy and trying out for the SEALs, his dad had taken him out for a drive in their old but well-maintained pickup truck. They’d wandered aimlessly for an hour or so, Nick, always quiet and pensive, letting his dad take his time. He finally told Nick that his mother was probably going to cry a bit, hell, that he might cry a bit, too. But not to let that stop him. That wasn’t why they were crying. They were proud of him. That Nick was about to grow up fast, faster than most men his age, who seemed determined to stay boys as long as possible. Most people ran away from the world, and Nick was running toward it. That was good, something to be proud of. Just be careful. Now let’s stop and get gas before it goes up another nickel because your dad spent a week running his mouth.
Nick watched the swirl of color outside his cockpit and realized he’d known himself for a long time. He was ready. He hoped his parents wouldn’t cry too much again. He accelerated toward the mothership.
I’ll carry your memories for you, Ben said in a mental telegram. I’ll keep those alive for you.
Thank you, my friend. You can shut down our link, if you’d like, he replied to Ben.
No. I’m with you all the way.
Me too, Eddie thought.
Without another word, Nick charged in with Ben and Eddie looking over his shoulder. The Chinese drones huddled tight, firing straight ahead, cutting a path straight toward the spiky mrill ship. Six seconds out.
Nick took a deep breath and let out all his regret. Everything else he’d envisioned for his life, he let it go.
Ben felt those dreams fall on his shoulders. The girl Nick had loved privately, Trisha, a short girl with long braids, who told jokes and loved spicy food and midnight movies. A half-repaired motorcycle, parts strewn in a garage around tools and oil spots and tattered user manuals. A not-yet-conceived child, the hope of a child, a fierce love waiting to be unleashed, a boy or girl to be introduced to Grampa and Gramma. Nick let it all fall away and Ben picked it up, feeling his friend’s memories as if they were his own. Not guilt. Just the memories and dreams of a friend who did not deserve death but had chosen it so that others might live.
Four seconds out. Nick activated the self-destruct and long tendrils of pure energy snaked out of the ship’s engine; the vessel began to vibrate with the impending reaction. The cockpit filled with light, and he watched as the mothership loomed ahead. All of its guns were now firing at his ship, but it was still shielded by the last of the ally drones. The mrill drones had also converged on his position. Shots rained down from every direction and began to pick through the gaps in the drone shield around his ship, but the blasts were now absorbed by the energy bubble growing around the ship. Ben felt the ion blasts and the raindrops pelt him simultaneously. The storm was everywhere. Nick, connected to Ben across two hundred thousand miles, felt it too. A bolt of lightning and cannon blast of thunder filled the skies over Washington as Nick’s ship reached its crescendo.
Everything was white.
Everything was destroyed.
His ship erupted like a like a new star being born, a furious sphere that engulfed everything in its path. The reaction fed on the mrill ship, growing and expanding. Ben felt his connection with Nick snap. He almost cried out with the pain as the explosive reaction continued, indifferent to his anguish.
The mothership tried to fire its engines, to open a cut in space and escape. Ben, through Eddie, saw a gaping, jagged portal open, and through it glimpsed for a moment a yellow, stormy planet, a random escape point somewhere in the universe that the desperate mrill had punched in. The ship tried to move toward the portal, but the explosion from Nick’s ship had done too much damage. The mothership’s engine tore itself apart, sending a flash of purple flames darting out into the vacuum. The stern of the ship disintegrated, and with that the portal collapsed. The ship was wrenched in half and Ben could now hear the pained, panicked screams of the mrill crew spilling over across frequencies. For a moment, the sound was everywhere, although another signal, impossible to decipher, seemed to be hidden in the cacophony. Then the ship bulged outward and detonated, a shockwave expanding in all directions that obliterated the last of the mrill drones and attack ships. All the voices were silenced.
Eddie, who had cruised out of
range of the explosion, sat steady in the void.
Then he slowly turned his ship around and headed back toward Earth.
36
“Sir, are you okay? Sir?”
Ben blinked, and he was back on the ground in Washington, DC. It was still raining, and he blinked again, pushing the water from his eyes. Above him stood a bloodied marine, rifle still at the ready. When Ben moved, he yelled for a medic.
Ben sat up and ran his hand along his side, then his leg. The wounds were gone. His body had expelled various pieces of metal and other shrapnel, and they lay on the ground around his body in an outline. No scars. None you could see, anyway.
“Don’t bother, Sergeant. I’m good. It’s over.”
“Sir?”
“We got ’em. Both the ground force and the mothership are destroyed. It’s time to look for wounded and regroup.”
The marine opened his mouth, glanced again at Ben’s gray skin and steady gaze, closed his mouth and moved off, ordering his men to organize search and rescue teams.
“General, you there?”
“I’m here, Ben,” Rickert replied. “I’m glad you’re there, too. I guess thank you doesn’t begin to cover it, but thank you.”
Ben looked up as he sensed Eddie’s ship descending through the rain clouds. The soldiers on the ground cried out as it emerged from the gloom, thinking it another mrill ship.
Ben stood and waved them off, assuring them it was one of the good guys.
He walked toward the ship as it settled in a small clearing in the wreckage.
“You know, all of this, all of the sacrifice, all it did was buy us some time,” Ben said to Rickert and Eddie over his connection. “The mrill sent their expeditionary force because they thought they could catch us with our pants down, or at least only halfway up. They thought they’d get lucky—they almost did. But this wasn’t their full strength. I don’t know how long we’ve got. A year or more, hopefully, while they assemble a complete invasion force and cross the galaxy. We’ll have to be better next time. We’ll need more like us.”
Eddie stepped down the ramp of his ship, quiet and thoughtful.
“We need to restart the nano injection process,” Ben said. “We need an army. The three of us barely held them back, and now there’s only two of us.”
“I know,” Rickert said.
“And I think the mrill sent one last signal down here at the very end.”
“Yeah, I felt it too,” Eddie said. “I don’t know what it was, but they broadcast something toward Earth. I don’t know. Something . . . a sleeper agent maybe?”
“Yeah, we might be fighting a two-front war before we know it,” Ben said. “Any word on the president?”
“They’re still digging. I don’t know. I hope so. I’m trying to get a command system up and running. Someone needs to address the country soon. The TV anchors have basically been crapping their pants, and I don’t think anyone else smells much better. If we’re going to regroup, we need to do it soon.”
“Copy that. I’ll be there soon, sir,” Ben said.
“Copy that. And . . . heck of a job out there. A lot of people are going to have a hard time saying that. There will be some that will blame you for what happened. Don’t listen to any of that. You, Eddie, Nick, you guys are heroes.”
“Thank you, sir. See you soon.”
Ben sighed. Eddie walked up to him and was silent for a moment. He dug into his pocket.
“You know, I heard you liked these,” he said as he pulled out two cigars.
Ben laughed in the rain. Eddie waved at one of the marines combing through the wreckage nearby.
“Hey, kid, got a light?”
The marine, a Lance Corporal with O’MALLEY stitched above his heart, approached slowly, picking his way through the concrete and steel, stumbling occasionally. He fumbled through his pockets, unable to keep his eyes off the two men and their gray skin. He finally produced a battered lighter and held it out to Eddie.
Eddie took it, flicked the cap open, and spun the wheel.
Click.
Ben leaned in to the fragile flame, blocking out the rain. He took a deep pull, letting the smoke fill him as his nanomachines filtered out the toxins. He exhaled, watching the smoke drift off. Eddie tossed the lighter back to the marine, who stared for another moment before his sergeant yelled for him to get back in formation. As the troops moved on, Ben and Eddie stood without speaking or thinking, surveying the destruction that stretched off to the northeast.
“So, you think you could have broken some more shit down here? I see a flower pot over there you forgot to nuke,” Eddie said, finally breaking the silence.
Ben laughed again. It seemed right. Earned. The rain was passing, and he felt cleansed, if not yet healed.
“Seriously, it’s like Godzilla used the city as his own personal ball scratcher. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna get stuck for the tab on this one.”
“Next time Godzilla has itchy nuts, I’ll be sure to call you first,” Ben said.
They both smiled and smoked as the clouds began to turn from gray to a soft white.
After a few minutes, Ben ground his cigar under his foot. He almost left it there, then bent down, picked it up, and flung it into a nearby trashcan that was almost miraculously unscathed. He lifted an eyebrow toward Eddie, who shrugged.
“Well, it’s a start. Ready to go?”
Ben nodded, his smile fading.
“Yeah, something I’ve got to do first.”
“What’s that?”
“I need to go see Nick’s parents. Diego’s, too.”
The sky coughed one last spat of rain, then fell into sullen silence as the weather system trudged east, out to sea.
The sun wasn’t out yet. Ben thought it might rain again, but the sun would emerge before the day was done.
“I’ll come with you,” Eddie said.
EPILOGUE
The Russian stood and stretched in his gray apartment. Out the window, the dishwater sky seemed to lack the conviction to promise rain, only to suggest it. The Russian rubbed the scar on his forehead and looked back at his now-dark laptop on the table in the corner.
This had not gone as planned. As promised.
He’d done his part. The invaders had not. He’d watched on the television as the tide of the battle shifted back and forth. He’d also had access to a video stream on his laptop that the Americans quite literally would have killed for; a vantage point in space that no one else on the planet had. That had gone dark when the Americans launched their final kamikaze attack.
It had gone dark, and then a last blip of data had arrived, and then contact had stopped altogether.
That blip contained a new world, though. Or, at least, blueprints for a new world. The invaders would return. Not immediately. They needed to regroup. But they would come. The Russian knew the blip meant he was expected to facilitate that effort. He considered that.
The invaders had been desperate. They had sent him much—perhaps too much for their own good.
The Russian had never been more than a general. A man who took orders.
Perhaps it was time to start giving them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Mike Hoogland, for faith, enthusiasm, advice, and insight into where I needed to add and where I needed to subtract, as well as prompt replies to my anxious emails.
Thank you to my editor, Jason Katzman, for saving me from myself multiple times and helping me see the way ahead.
Thank you to my wife, Sarah, and our kids, for letting me run off for hours on end to write, rewrite, and pretend to write.
Thank you to Mom and Dad, for believing all this was possible, and for reading first drafts that were far too rough.
Thank you, Gramma, for making me rewrite that essay in high school a dozen times until it was just right. You prepared me for the last seven years.
Thank you, reader, for reading.
dinez Victor, The First Protectors: A Novel
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 34